YMMV / Samurai Cop

• Complete Monster: Fujiyama is the ruthless leader of the Katana crime syndicate. In his attempts to take over the Los Angeles underworld, Fujiyama orders the assassination of a rival gang boss. When Joe Marshall gets his attention by investigating a drug run some of his goons are doing, he declares war on the cop, sending many of his own men to their deaths due to his "Code of Silence" forbidding them from being taken alive. In his feud, Fujiyama has one of Marshall's fellow cops killed along with his wife, the latter of whom was also sexually assaulted, and another one tortured with boiling oil. In the final battle, Fujiyama tricks our hero into letting his guard down, and tries to kill him along with his partner and his Love Interest.
• Designated Hero: The climax has Joe and Frank on their captain's orders forgo everything legal and just murder all the bad guys. Captain Roma says they'll all hand in their badges after this, but in reality they'd more likely face serious jail time.
• Funny Moments: The delivery really sells this. Joe has just climbed a fence only to find Frank squeezing his way underneath.
  Joe: Why did you come under?
  Frank: 'Cause I'm an undercover cop.
• Ham and Cheese: Dale Cummings as Captain Roma gives the film's best performance, which just so happens to be it's loudest one.
  Counselor: I'll see you in court.
  Roma: You motherfucker, I'll see you in hell! Leave me alone! Get a job!
• Ho Yay:
  • Frank playfully kisses Captain Roma, who after an angry outburst, looks quite pleased. Though that may just be the actor breaking character. The homoeroticism of the scene is only made more noticeable by Roma having just mentioned it feeling like he has a club stuck up his ass.
  • The Mook threatening to castrate Frank does so by calling his penis "this black gift".
• Moral Event Horizon: Yamashita crosses it when he kills Johnson's wife, who is an entirely innocent woman.
• Narm: It'd be easier to list the scenes in this film that don't have Narm. Special mention goes to the big America speech from Joe, the infamous horny nurse scene, the Car Chase and practically every word out of Fujiyama's badly-dubbed mouth.
• Signature Scene:
  • The infamous "horny nurse" scene, which played a major role in making this movie infamous when it was uploaded to YouTube.
  • The famous "Use it before you lose it" scene where Joe, Frank and Peggy all seem to have a fit of insanity and start making sex jokes in the middle of a stakeout.
  • The iconic "Cookie Monster" scene, where Joe talks to a forensics examiner with some of the worst ADR in cinema history. It got it's name because the voice assigned to the actor sounds like Cookie Monster on the verge of tears.
• So Bad, It's Good: The main reason why this film is still remembered to this day. Allison Pregler noted that even among So Bad, It's Good movies (which often have long parts that are dull, irritating, or just inept in ways that aren't entertaining), Samurai Cop stands out for being genuinely hilarious from the beginning to the end.
• Special Effect Failure: All over the place, due to the film's cheapness, but there are some standout examples:
  • In the early car chase scene, Peggy is riding in a helicopter that is very obviously just sitting on the ground with its rotor blades not turning (with a Hitler Cam being used to try and disguise this fact).
  • In the same sequence, when the cars round a bend in a dirt road, we're treated to a brief closeup of Joe quickly turning the wheel... or at least pretending he is. His hands slide energetically along the steering wheel, but it doesn't actually turn.
  • The various weapons in the first movie are very clearly fake, and it's also apparent that the production only had so many of them: revolvers don't have their cylinders turn when fired, the exact same shotgun magically ends up in a new mook's arms after every death of the previous wielder, the fake katanas clearly have severe chipping from repeated clashing over multiple takes, etc.
  • During the shootout at the restaurant, while Yamashita is blasting away at Joe and Frank with an Uzi, the car they're hiding behind gets shot to pieces. Then it magically repairs itself and gets shot to pieces a couple more times—with the damage disappearing not just between shots, but at one point during the same shot.
  • When Yamashita shoots his own henchman in the restaurant parking lot, not only is the henchman clearly being shot with paintballs, the paint is pink instead of red.
  • And then there are the countless scenes where lighting/coloring/overall looks of a scene wildly change from shot to shot, due to all the sloppy reshoots and overall incompetence. It's like the shootouts take place between entirely different planes of reality, and the same scene can be initially in twilight, then suddenly back to mid-day, then back to a setting sun again.
  • Speaking of reshoots, Joe is very clearly wearing a wig in large parts of the movie (with one shot leaving in the Blooper of Okamura accidentally ripping the wig off of Joe's head). This is because the actor thought the movie was finished and cut his hair short, only to be told that there was still half the movie to shoot.
  • Several characters shown as having died are seen in close-ups where the actors' chests are obviously moving, the production being too cheap to even use dummies for shots of corpses.
  • Many of the close-ups in the dialogue scenes are clearly in different locations. One notable example is the 'son of a bitches' speech in the diner - Joe's closeups are clearly in a different location from the diner.
  • The director had to do automatic dialogue replacement (a.k.a. ADR, had to replace the missing dialogue) but could not get many of the actors to return. He instead dubbed many of the lines himself and warped it in post-production to try to make it sound like different people. His lack of ability to do either of these tasks correctly resulted in ADR with a heavily robotic sound and people that end up not sounding like people.
  • If you're even passingly familiar with Los Angeles, the car chase at the start of the movie is hilarious, as it involves characters crossing vast stretches of southern California in minutes or seconds.
  • In the sequel, the use of CGI blood and bullet wounds in lieu of makeup and squibs is hampered by constant motion-tracking issues.

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